2006 is winding down, and as psionandy put it over at Mobility Site recently, "It’s that time of year when everyone starts putting together their top 10 whatevers". Inspired partly by those words, and largely by Nowire’s ‘Nowire Recommended Application’ button graphic  (which was immediately greeted with cries of ‘Can you make me one, and me, and me please’), we offer you our first of several year-end Top …. Lists.

We are cobbling together – for your reading pleasure, or amusement, or possibly just as very fine targets for your blistering criticism – several lists of our Top However Many mobile applications and accessories in several different categories, starting with work-related programs today.

Read on for details of our rigid selection process, the judging committee, and our Top 20 choices …

So, this list is of our favorite ‘business or work-related’ mobile applications. Here’s a little more background on how we’ve compiled this list:

The Judges: Most of your contributors here at Just Another Mobile Monday – myself, Steve Laser, dgoldring, Netsyd, Nowire, and Ravi.

Criteria (for this Top 20 List): Well, these need to be, how can we put this, business or work-related apps.

The Judging Process: All of us have spent quite literally several minutes (judging by email timestamps on original mail compared with thoughtful replies received and so on) thinking about and nominating our favorites in each category and submitted them. Once submitted, we’ve decided to have no vetting process at all – we’ll just present you with however many favorites we come up with in each group. So in any given category, one of us might have 10 favorites, and another of us might have none. We’ll just show you all the choices and provide a little info on which ones got how many votes.

It’s also worth noting that I think all of us are primarily Windows Mobile users – so our lists are pretty much all Windows Mobile programs.

So here’s the first list. The apps are listed in order of how many votes they got (lots of ties here as you can imagine). We’ve listed the number of votes next to each, for all those that received more than one vote.

JAMM’s Top 20 Work-Related Applications

ListPro – 3
eWallet – 3
Pocket Informant  – 3
FlexWallet – 2
Agenda Fusion – 2
Spb Backup – 2
Spb Diary – 2
NewsBreak – 2
Act
Agenda One
CodeWallet
Fizz Traveller
PhatNotes
PhatPad
PlanMaker
Sprite Backup
Today Agenda
TomTom 5
VoiceMinder
Trancreative Wordbook

Couple possibly interesting things to note in reference to this rigorous and highly scientific exercise – there were no unanimous choices, as you can see the top three only got votes from half of us. The range of apps is pretty narrow in this category – digital wallets, organizers, backup, note-taking etc. 

There you have it – our first year-end ‘Top 10 Whatevers’ effort.  Those guys and gals over at the Best Software Awards will be sweating when they see this stuff!

Let us know what you think – what do you agree or disagree with, what did we leave out – and all that good stuff …